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It’s Eurovision time again, hosted by the city of Liverpool rather than last year’s winner, Ukraine, for obvious reasons (one sincerely hopes that pop-loving Russians will blow an appropriately loud raspberry at Mr Putin for getting their country kicked out last year). From what I have heard so far, this year promises to be the usual festival of tacky, over-the-top, joyous gender-non-specific fun that most Britons watch in the secret hope of hearing the words: ‘nul points’ from the judges.
But you never know. Glenn Fosbraey of the University of Winchester believes he has cracked the code of what makes a winning Eurovision entry and Mae Muller’s I Wrote a Song presses more of those buttons, hitting – as he says – “an eight or a nine on the cliche-ometer”.
Once upon a time most of the people I knew wouldn’t watch Eurovision if they were paid to – we all saw it as incredibly naff. How things have changed: naff is the new cool at least for some people, as this expert in “cool theory” explains. Plus the visibility the show has given to LGBTQ+ culture is just another of the many reasons to indulge in this guilt-free cheese fest.
Israel, which is also represented in Eurovision tonight, has its own big celebration tomorrow when it marks the 75th anniversary of the declaration of its statehood in 1948. We’ve commissioned a series of stories about this significant anniversary including this fascinating piece about how the Jewish resistance movement ran rings around Britain in the lead-up to independence. But Palestinians aren’t celebrating: Monday marks 75 years since “al Nakba” – the catastrophe – which saw millions of innocent people driven off their land, and continues to dominate the Palestinian experience today.
This week, after King Charles’s coronation, we also asked whether British tourism really needs the royal family, we read about a new vaccine for the deadly virus RSV, and – as Donald Trump was found guilty of sexual assault in a New
York court, we looked at myths about how women are supposed to react to rape.
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